Staff profile

I am a PhD candidate in Italian literature, working at the intersection of affect, queer studies, and psychoanalysis, with a focus on how narrative forms and characters challenge and destabilise dominant cultural ideals. I studied English and German languages and literatures at the University of Trieste. During the final year of my undergraduate studies, I was an exchange student at Freie Universität Berlin, thanks to an Erasmus+ scholarship. In the open-minded environment of the German capital, I encountered queer studies academically for the first time. These and feminist theories formed the basis of my bachelor’s thesis. In it, I examined the representation of motherhood in the work of the playwright Bertolt Brecht. Through the analysis of three representative works (Die Mutter, Mutter Courage, Der kaukasische Kreidekreis), I examined how Brecht’s staging of unconventional maternal characters overtly challenges the heteronormative Western ideal of maternity.

After completing my BA, I embarked on my master’s studies in European Literatures at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. These studies deepened my engagement with affect theory, queer methodologies, and the European novel from antiquity to the present. In writing my master’s thesis, I combined Siegfried J. Schmidt’s theory of fictionality with Humberto R. Maturana’s early conceptualisation of autopoiesis and Gramscian philosophy. On this theoretical foundation, I outlined a new queer reading methodology, which I applied to two case studies: Thomas Mann’s novella Tonio Kröger and Umberto Saba’s posthumous novel Ernesto.

Alongside my studies, I worked as a student research assistant on the project Studying Academic Discussions on the Art of Poetry in Late Renaissance Florence, hosted by the Excellence Cluster 2020 Temporal Communities. Under the lead of Professor Ulrike Schneider, I transcribed, modernised, and digitised the transcriptions of manuscripts in 16th-century Florentine dialect.

From February 2025 to July 2025, I held a Humboldt Research Track Scholarship, which supports graduates in developing a doctoral research project.

PhD Project

Funded by the AHRC Northern Bridge Consortium, my PhD thesis examines the employment of affect in the works of post-war and contemporary Italian women writers, Elsa Morante, Anna Maria Ortese, and Elena Ferrante. Challenging critiques that have systematically discredited their style as sentimental, the project revalues their writings by arguing that articulating affective experiences of oppression and non-heteronormativity enables the female voice to resist dominant cultural discourses. Through the first systematic application of contemporary affect theory to these authors’ works, the thesis reconsiders the use of affect in twentieth-century female-authored Italian literature as a productive means of questioning hegemonic structures.

• Affect studies
• 20th-century and contemporary literature
• Kleinian psychoanalysis
• Literary theory
• Queer and feminist studies

Book review

• Spignoli, Teresa, Gloria Manghetti, Giovanna Lo Monaco, and Elisa Caporiccio, eds. ‘Il tramonto d’Europa’. Ungaretti e le poetiche del secondo Novecento. Firenze: Firenze UP, 2023. Pp. 198.
  
  Toma, A. (2025). Spignoli, Teresa, Gloria Manghetti, Giovanna Lo Monaco, and Elisa Caporiccio, eds. ‘Il tramonto d’Europa’. Ungaretti e le poetiche del secondo Novecento. Firenze: Firenze UP, 2023. Pp. 198. Annali D’italianistica, 43, Article 668-670.
• Dominique Budor. Scrivere, ovvero nascere a se stesso. Saggio su Luigi Pirandello
  
  Toma, A. (2024). Dominique Budor. Scrivere, ovvero nascere a se stesso. Saggio su Luigi Pirandello. Annali D’italianistica, 42, 640-642.

Chapter in book

• “I Looked at Myself, Smiled at Myself”: Repairing Mental Well-Being Through Subaltern Ekphrasis
  
  Toma, A. (2026). “I Looked at Myself, Smiled at Myself”: Repairing Mental Well-Being Through Subaltern Ekphrasis. In C. Clonts, L. Cardilli, & Y. Kazufumi (Eds.), Exploring Body-Mind Interactions and Their Impact on Well-Being: Holistic Practices (1st ed., pp. 113-142). IGI Global Scientific Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3373-3521-6.ch005

Conference Paper

• Through Affects and Depression to a New Self: Disentangling Ekphrasis on the Example of Elena Ferrante’s L’amore Molesto
  
  Toma, A. (2024, November 7). Through Affects and Depression to a New Self: Disentangling Ekphrasis on the Example of Elena Ferrante’s L’amore Molesto [Conference paper]. Presented at Body-mind Interactions in Arts, Health, Literatures and Sciences, WBA Research project, Kyushu University, Fukuoka (JPN).
• Feeling Between and Beyond the Margins. Negative and Positive Affects in the Narrative World-Model of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend
  
  Toma, A. (2023, September 7). Feeling Between and Beyond the Margins. Negative and Positive Affects in the Narrative World-Model of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend [Conference paper]. Presented at 2023 SIS Themed Conference ‘Affect, Sensation, Emotion’, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge.

Presentation

• Measurement Heresies and Clinical Futures: Insights from the Feedback Loop
  
  Toma, A., & Feedback Loop Members. (2026, March 11 – 2026, March 13). Measurement Heresies and Clinical Futures: Insights from the Feedback Loop. Presented at Measurement Heretics Workshop: Being, Meaning and Measuring Well, Institute of Medical Humanities, Durham University.
• The Liberation of Emotions. Verbalisation of Negative Affective Economies in Italian Literature between the 19th and the 20th Century.
  
  Toma, A., & Marini, M. S. (2024, June 15). The Liberation of Emotions. Verbalisation of Negative Affective Economies in Italian Literature between the 19th and the 20th Century. Presented at 2024 CAIS Conference, Orvieto (IT).